I wonder what your feelings are about facebook? At the present time I have a deactivated account. Just seems like too much negativity on there especially about political issues. I had a good friend delete me last year because I disagreed with him about political issues.
I loathe Faceache with a passion.
I have an account there simply because it's the only way I get updates from a few people I don't want to lose contact with completely. As a rule about all I post are silly memes that made me laugh.
I truly loathe the way Faceache brings out the worst in polarised opinions. It's remarkable how many people I consider friends post political rants that suggest they think I'm an idiot because I don't share their political views. I despise the idea that every single thing I post is logged and analyzed to learn far more about me than I'd want learned (which is why I don't post much). I despise the model of encouraging people to most more and more and more about themselves rather than encouraging people to think twice before they write. I despise the vulnerabilities it creates in peoples' lives as they are dumbed down to the point of thinking that their "woohoo, two weeks in the sun here I come!" is anything other than synonymous with "my house is probably unoccupied for the next two weeks while I sun myself" to those less honest, or even the act of "checking in" to a location doesn't give away the fact they probably aren't home.
It doesn't take a lot to look over someone's profile and get a feel for what sort of place they live and who their family are. So many people helpfully list their family members and it's not hard to tell from someone's posts whether they have adult children, young children or no children. Then throw in the post that checks in to some location a couple of hours from home tagged with their spouse, and you can get a good idea whether the home is empty and for how long.
A few years back some wag created two sites, pleaserobme.com and followagirl.com where he compiled information people posted publicly as a way to alert people to think twice about what they posted and how it might be abused. Pleaserobme.com compiled posts where people did things like "check out this cool bug in my back yard" with a geotagged photo that might as well have listed their address in full, then posted "I'm at Chicago O'Hare ready to jet off to Cancun for a fortnight". Followagirl.com essentially looked for people with female names checking in to one location after another after another, on the basis it wouldn't take a genius to figure out which face was present at a succession of public venues. Of course it couldn't tell whether the girl in question was a 22-year-old swimwear model or a 65-year-old grandmother with chronic halitosis but as a tool to get people to think about what they post I hope it made its point.
The thing I find remarkable is that if a market research company asks for information that's even remotely personal people shut down and refuse to disclose it. Put Faceache in front of them and it's remarkable how much information they hand over, daily, without even being prompted.
I'm pleased with the fact that the "suggested posts" Faceache presents me with span most of the political spectrum, the "people I may know" contains some people I genuinely know but haven't bothered to add to my friends list and some people I've never heard of, so it appears they are struggling to put together much of a profile on me. Sometimes I click suggested posts that don't actually interest me in the slightest, just to maintain that status.
